Thursday, November 24, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, proudly notes that Facebook sharing continues to increase at an exponential rate. There are concerns, however, that this culture of sharing is spilling over beyond Facebook and other social networking sites.

Generation S (for sharing) has lost sight of prior privacy norms and now freely shares all, from the banal to the most intimate. And with the advent of things like digital medical files — potentially easily shared online — the disclosure of heretofore very private medical information could have real-life consequences, particularly for the sharer’s relatives, who have common medical and genetic information but who themselves often wisely choose to keep that information private.